The
War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Menby
Christina Hoff SommersReviewed by
Rabbi A. Shneur Horowitz, M.D., Ph.D.

Three books have
been published in the last few years which bear potential to begin re-molding
the present cultural view of younger people in a way more beneficial to
them and to those who love them. This overall attitude, called a “discourse”
by phenomenologists, powerfully determines what people in general conceive
of as the “nature” of children. A new or changed discourse often emerges
first among the educated classes, and then gradually “filters down” and
spreads to include nearly everyone. The inane reaction to Rind-Tromovitch-Bauserman
convinced me more than ever that the fundamental pathology of this society
is antipathy towards children themselves, and that the genocidal pursuit
of boy lovers is, to a significant extent, “collateral damage” in a war
to degrade, dehumanize, and continue the subjugation of young persons.

The
first book of the trio is Judith Harris’s The Nurture Assumption.
That book’s thesis, if taken seriously, breaks the putative strangle-hold
of parents over the future personalities of their offspring, and shifts
the locus of that control onto the children themselves, their distinct
child-culture, and the associates whom they in part choose as “peers.”
The second book is the present one, and the third is Steven Pinker’s The
Blank Slate. Christina Hoff Sommers is a philosopher and polemicist,
who now focuses her disenchantment with the “women’s movement,” previously
elaborated in Who Stole Feminism? upon a largely successful, and
totally spurious, campaign to represent girls as culturally “disadvantaged,”
and to enlist the educational system, public and private, in turning the
tables on supposedly overrated and overprivileged boys.

The author presents
her charge clearly in her Preface:

This
book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology
to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning
against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness,
and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of
what is right in the world.... That boys are in disrepute is not accidental:...
for many years women’s groups have been complaining that boys are benefiting
from a school system that favors boys and is biased against girls.... The
research commonly cited to support the claims of male privilege and sinfulness
is riddled with errors,... yet the false picture remains and is dutifully
passed along in schools of education, in ‘gender equity workshops,’ and
increasingly to children themselves.

Thus, Sommers hails
boys’ inherent masculine characteristics, their “boy-ness” if you will,
and decries the feminists’ attempts to destroy it. “The belief that boys
are being wrongly ‘masculinized’ is inspiring a movement to ‘construct
boyhood’ in ways that will render boys less competitive, more emotionally
expressive, more nurturing – more, in short, like girls.” Sadly, the author
is not yet quite brave enough to name boys’ sexuality among their defining
attributes, but I suspect it too was in her thoughts. One hardly can adopt
a position of allowing and facilitating “boys to be boys” without accepting
that sex and sex play are integral to who they are.

Part of what makes
this book important reading is that Sommers competently attacks, as she
did in her first book, the “junk science” that underpins much of the persecution
of both boys and boy lovers, and that maintains an entire pseudoacademic
community of faux-scholars, with their own organizations, journals, and
copious meetings. Nobel chemistry prize-winner Irving Langmuir called this
“pathological science,” or “the science of things that aren’t so.” Those
of us reading this publication in prisons are painfully aware of how such
effluvium can create and support a discourse of demonization. The author
discusses past misuse of academic disciplines to reinforce women’ s inferior
social position, and declaims: ‘‘The corrective to that shameful history
is not more bad science and rancorous philosophy; it is good science and
clear thinking about the rights of all individuals, however they may differ.”
Well, we won’t disagree with that, but would she apply it to us?

To me, the link
between feminist attacks on boys and hatred of youth-oriented adults is
clear. “Getting boys to be more like girls means getting them to stop segregating
themselves into all-male groups. That’s the darker, coercive side of the
project to ‘free’ boys from their masculine straitjackets.” How much more
so, then, must these “equity specialists” fear and loathe the erotic pair-bond
between a boy and a man, which results in the boy identifying with and
incorporating his mentor’s masculinity, and definitively excludes other,
feminizing influences. Sommers recognizes that “anyone in close contact
with [boys] gets daily proof of most boys’ humanity, loyalty, and compassion.”
Anathema, then, to the feminizers must be a boy’s most intense and uncompromising
expression of those enviable traits toward a man who has taken a special
interest in his welfare, development, and pleasure.

Unfortunately,
in her final analysis, Christina Hoff Sommers vacillates on her principles
of individualism and respect when it comes to children. She properly condemns
the “promoters of ‘gender fairness’” as being “far too reckless with the
truth, far too removed from the precincts of common sense, and far too
negative about boys.” She accuses them of “tampering with children’s individuality
[and] intruding on their privacy.” She asserts that ‘‘most children respond
to and respect civility and good manners." However, that old undercurrent
of denigrating mistrust is still there, even in this stalwart crusader
for dignity and individuality. After all the preceding, she then blames
the Supreme Court’s modest extension of constitutional protections to children
during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, most of which have anyway been rescinded
by now, for the “diminished… power of teachers to enforce order and discipline.

While it is correct
that “if [children’s] own manners are wanting, it is because so little
is expected (much less demanded) of them,” it is incorrect to equate “demands”
with the use of force to obtain compliance. Neither children nor anyone
else learns morality from being coerced to behave morally. When Aristotle
said that we learn to be good by practicing being good, what he meant was
practicing choosing the good. There is no incompatibility between setting
high standards of behavior or teaching in a directive no-nonsense manner,
and respecting children’s rights. Children study karate, join choirs, train
in gymnastics, and in general apprentice themselves enthusiastically and
completely voluntarily to many appealing endeavors that are inherently
quite authoritarian. If schools are not enticing and stimulating places,
if contrariwise they are “rife with incivility, profanity, and bullying...
– a nightmare for many children,” then that is their fault, not the children’s.
As this writer knows only too well, being committed for twelve years or
more to an institution where one gets no respect, into the governance of
which one has no input, and where choosing to opt out is a criminal offense,
is enough to make anybody bitter and rather nasty.